“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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Annie Dillard 63
American writer 1945Related quotes

Source: All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day
"College Master Looks at His World: Author Davies Finds Youth Little Changed".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Quoted in Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (1996) by Gale E. Christianson, p. 183.

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 5. <!-- pp. 41-42 -->
Context: It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Source: I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”